Students’ Difficulties in Designing Research Proposal (A Case Study at English Department Students of UIN Ar-raniry)

This research discovers the students’ difficulties in designing a research proposal. It aims: (1) to find out the students’ difficulties in designing a research proposal; (2) to propose possible solutions to solve the students’ difficulties in designing a research proposal. This research used a qualitative descriptive, and the data were collected through the interview method. The participants are six undergraduate students batch 2015 from Department of English Language Education, Tarbiyah Faculty, UIN Ar-Raniry. This research found that the students’ difficulties in designing research proposal includes finding the title and topic or problem to be studied, lack of English ability, finding adequate reference sources, understanding research proposal, developing ideas, designing research methodology, and understanding the article of international journal as they often use the advanced word; (2) The solutions that are used by the students in designing research proposal involves reading a lot of international journals, articles and books, finding a lot of materials and reference sources, asking for help from the lecturers and friends, using some techniques in developing ideas, and improving academic language.